Volume Control

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• May 7, 2017

At 18, I bought my first car.  A 2001 silver Nissan Altima, with cigarette burns on the seats, and I bought it, cash, with all the money I had made from being a child laborer (seriously, I had jobs that broke child labor laws for years).  I couldn’t be more thrilled.  I loved that car more than I loved most people.  And within 48 hours, I blew out all the speakers and had to shell out another few hundred dollars to have them replaced. Both my parents called me an idiot, which at the time, I thought was unjust, but in retrospect, they may have had a point.

“Don’t blast your music all the time,” my Dad lectured, “you have to listen to your car to hear if something goes wrong.”

“That’s why I’m gonna blast it.  I don’t wanna know.”

“Don’t be an idiot!”

But I think we already established I’m idiot.  Listening to music on max volume wasn’t new for me.  There are a couple reasons for this, and one of those reasons is because I have the hearing of a 70 year old.

Growing up, I perpetually got middle ear infections.  On top of this, I had all these allergies to antibiotics, so treating me became a matter of trial and error for doctors, as I was susceptible to bizarre side effects.  Is it any wonder I’m a hypochondriac?  I got sick a lot as a kid.  Mostly ear, nose, and throat issues.  But the ear infections were excruciatingly painful, and ear pain is hard to alleviate.  I’m unsure why I was so prone to ear infections?  My sister and brother never had more than the occasional swimmers ear.  But I got them so frequently, my hearing was subsequently damaged.  The doctors wanted to put tubes in my ears, which my Mom declined. To my Mom’s credit, she refused a lot of doctors poorly thought out recommended treatments for me, especially steroids, because I was an abnormally small runt, but late blooming runs in the family, so my Mom wouldn’t let them drug me up.  The doctor predicted I would be a legal dwarf.  The doctor was wrong.  Mom was right.  Fuck you, pediatrician.  I’m 5’7, and it only took 23 years for me get there.

It is my deepest hope that hearing restoration is in the near future, because I’m going to need it.  I was terrified of needing hearing aids as a kid.  I figured out a way to cheat on those hearing tests they used to give you in school.  I just watched them push the buttons, and would raise my hands accordingly.  Clever girl.

While I might have the worst hearing out of anyone in my family, you’d think my entire family was borderline deaf because of how loud our household was.  Both our immediate and extended family are so loud when communicating.  Being Italian is only half to blame.  My Mom played music loud, my Dad and sister watched TV with the sound blaring, my brother was always running around making gun sound effects, and when we watched action movies together, the bass would shake the entire house.  The louder the better.  I would not outgrow this.  My already poor hearing was/is quickly deteriorating.

However, I hate going to loud bars with friends or on a date, because then I can’t hear anything. But I like going to loud bars to write or read.  I find I’m constantly turning up the volume when I have my headphones in with no avail because I’m already listening at the highest volume.  People on trains have asked me to lower the volume on my headphones because even they can hear it.  Sorry about that.

So yes, I am going deaf, and I am making no effort to prevent myself from worsening hearing loss.  I used to have an X-Box in my apartment that I mainly used to stream Netflix and HBO.  I would watch Game of Thrones with the volume so loud, the X-Box thought I was giving it voice commands and would pause my programming.  The bad part is, I didn’t even think it was loud!  If it’s really late, I turn on subtitles as a courtesy to my neighbors.  I once dated a guy who had normal hearing and didn’t want to watch movies loud because it would disturb his roommate.  This irked the shit out of me because I would miss a good portion of the dialogue but I was too embarrassed to ask if he could turn on subtitles because I didn’t want to seem like the worlds oldest twenty something year old.

Much of my time is spent in my car driving to gigs.  You can sure as hell guess that the music is blasting in there too.  Sometimes, because I’m grooving to great tunes, sometimes, just to drown out my thoughts.

And that’s where it gets tricky.

The only reason I’m now especially cognizant of how loud prevailing thought loops are in my cranium is because I’m no longer medicated for it.  Actually, I’m quite impressed that a younger Lori was able to handle it so well, but I guess that’s all I ever knew, so it never seemed out of the norm for me.  The low dosage of anti-psychotics I was on lowered the volume in my head.  And I was convinced the meds did nothing for me except help me sleep better until I stopped taking them.  After suffering from physical withdrawals from ignoring my doctor and not properly weaning myself off, I went back to how I’ve always been… a brain occupied by a clusterfuck of thoughts.  But that part isn’t new!  It’s always been that way. But post meds was like if you took all my thoughts and raised the volume, which at times can be overwhelming, and it’s like a bad news panel where every one is just yelling and it’s difficult to process anything.

I pass out at night from complete exhaustion, mostly due to my lifestyle, and that I can never sit still until I lay down and then all of a sudden, I’m dead tired. Then, I’m woken up by my brain just a few hours later, and even though it’s quiet save for the sound of a ticking clock in my apartment, my thought loops are blaring, and I’d wide awake.  But I have learned from my past.  Insomnia is a fast track to lunacy, and I’m looking to avoid that.  Some early mornings, I just won’t go back to sleep, and that’s okay.  But I won’t allow myself to get out of bed, even though my brain is like, “use this extra time to get work done!” I aim to quiet my mind by concentrating on something very basic.  Something super, super simple.  The way my nephew says my name.  A line of dialogue in a script I’m working on.  The color of the water in Hawaii.  The thought of someone running their fingers through my hair.  It has to be so simple, and relatively comforting.  This does work for me, and I can get a little more sleep in.

There are some obvious cons of having a relentlessly loud brain.  I get worn out.  I feel the need to unplug amps, especially ones that are connected to personal relationships.  It strains relationships because it increases my already flaky and noncommittal temperament.  Thoughts are sometimes contradicting, making decision making difficult if not impossible.  Even some of the people I’m closest to have no idea how I’m feeling or thinking at times, and being enigmatic is not something I do purposefully, it’s just another side effect of me navigating my own brain.  It’s chaos in here.  But I love it.

Why?  Why would I love that?  It’s enthralling.  Creativity flows, and anxiety is balanced out with excitement.  It’s like being on cocaine, or falling in love, when you’re in a tailspin, there’s electricity in your brain that flows to all your nerve endings.  I can literally physically feel it spread to my extremities.  I like being this way, you see?  I know that’s half crazy, but I’m half crazy, so it works for me.  The way my head works is a gift as much as it’s a curse.

Perhaps this is my preferred state because I know the opposite.  When the volume is muted is when I’m at my worst, and lose myself.  Give me a crowded head over an empty one any day.  Turn that volume way the fuck up for all I care.  In there, I find hope, fervor, passion, and motivation.  Sometimes, I wish I could control the volume a little bit (and I attempt to by self medicating, which works as often as it doesn’t), because being this way makes present living challenging.  Thus, I’m ever caught in chasing happiness down rabbit holes, catching it, shoving it down my throat, only to throw it up again and again.  Like the antibiotics my body rejected to treat my persistent ear infections, my body seems especially adverse to cures.

“I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present “normal” self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In short, for myself, I am a hard act to follow.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind